TR: The Last Romantic
Brands, H.W.
BOOKS IN REVIEW Someone for Everyone TR: The Last Romantic H.W. Brands Basic Books / 897 pages /$35 REVIEWED BY Philip Terzian T he president who built a bridge to the twentieth century was a...
...Now scarcely a season goes by without another monograph, study, or profile on the market...
...But it also begs a larger question, one that has challenged historians, journalists, political scientists—and most recently H.W...
...The progressive who taunted "the malefactors of great wealth" could not have conceived of the Great Society...
...The modern conservative will admire his projection of U.S...
...As with44 It is difficult to translate Theodore Roosevelt's actions and convictions into modern times...
...The times are bound to alter our retrospective view, but the careful historian has performed his basic task, with elegance, insight, sympathy, and style...
...He preached the achievement of great objects in life, but wasted much energy in petty press debates on simplified spelling and sentimental naturalists...
...We see in Theodore Roosevelt what we wish to see...
...W hy, a century later, are we interested in reading about Theodore Roosevelt...
...It served him less well, however, when he was persuaded that his successor was spoiling his legacy...
...The sheer depth, complexity, and expansiveness of Roosevelt's mind was finally on display, prompting aslow and favorable public reassessment...
...the interested reader will savor his life story...
...Yet the president who wrote more books than any other, who spoke German to the Kaiser and could identify hundreds of bird songs and species, was far from anyone's idea of an intellectual...
...his Dakota ranch had not prospered...
...In 1931 the first serious biography, by Henry F. Pringle (1944), depicted the bellicose, slightly hysterical, and faintly ridiculous figure of fun seen in Arsenic and Old Lace (1990, a theme smoothly wrapped in scholarly trappings by Richard Hofstadter in The American Political Tradition (1948...
...As a personality and executive, there had been no president like him before he took office, and there has been none since...
...yet a bust of Roosevelt (alongside another of his distant cousin Franklin) stands behind Bill Clinton's desk in his White House office...
...Not every determined boy becomes Theodore Roosevelt, and, as he himself acknowledged, Roosevelt never quite grew into maturity...
...A daunting 76 March 1998 • The American Spectator task is successfully mastered: Brands commands his copious subject, and the narrative proceeds at an orderly pace, in understated tones and subtle conjecture, through the course of Roosevelt's tumultuous life...
...Roosevelt was a practical politician, to be sure, but he was also essentially indifferent to public opinion...
...He was admired for his early and prescient advocacy of American participation in the Great War, in which one of his sons was killed...
...There were formative, even chastening, experiences—the deaths of his father, first wife and youngest son, as well as his various political disappointments—but none seemed to quench his frantic ambition, or satisfy his appetite for struggle and adversity...
...The naturalist who set aside great tracts of the West would be mystified by Superfund...
...Roosevelt was a dynamic figure, whose actions were broadly influential in the growth of American government...
...His instincts were reactive, not analytical...
...his public career was a series of fits and starts, largely dependent on patronage and luck...
...There have been several television biographies of Roosevelt in the past few years...
...There are occasional side trips to the analyst's couch—Brands sees Taft as a substitute for Roosevelt's feckless brother Elliott—but these are thankfully limited in scope...
...We might do well by considering the course of Roosevelt's reputation...
...In this impressive work, Professor Brands has allowed us to see Roosevelt as he was, and perhaps more important, as he saw himself...
...Roosevelt's life, he suggests, was governed by a set of unshakable convictions, tangled by a series of personal calamities, and propelled by a fierce, romantic attachment to ideals, ambition, and self-competition...
...The White House, as it were, was a therapeutic accident...
...In 1954 John Morton Blum, associate editor of Morison's project, wrote The Republican Roosevelt, a brief, admiring study which examined TR's copious intellect, traced the pervasive influence of his policies, and sought to dissect the substance behind the style...
...This blended nicely with the dawn of the modern age of publicity...
...1 78 March 1998 • The American Spectator...
...To the modern reader this is all very startling and refreshing...
...Its very title, however, suggested that Roosevelt I seemed destined to remain in the shadow of Roosevelt II...
...nor would he have argued that "the business of America is business...
...Brands, professor of history at Texas A&M —for nearly a century: Where, exactly, does Roosevelt stand in the scheme of American history, and what is his legacy...
...Indeed, his various contradictions were part of his appeal...
...Reading about Roosevelt is instructive and entertaining...
...The volume and diversity of Roosevelt's career is harnessed in lucid and occasionally humorous tones...
...The presidency, which fell into his lap with the assassination of William McKinley, suddenly afforded him a suitable outlet for his manifold interests, obsessions, and concerns...
...he is even featured in a recent best-selling novel, The Alienist by Caleb Carr...
...It is difficult to imagine a statesman less in tune with the Jazz Age than Theodore Roosevelt '1R would not have considered "normalcy" a fit pursuit of a great people...
...His convictions were sure, his views were intense, and his notions of right and wrong were fixed and inflexible...
...Between Roosevelt's death and the election of Warren Harding came the struggle over American participation in the League of Nations — a "defining" event, as we would now say—and national disenchantment with global ambition...
...was generally considered to be the frontrunner for the 1920 Republican presidential nomination...
...the amateur enthusiast who pushed every interest—in natural history, in scholarship, hunting, physical exertion, even the pursuit of his first wife, Alice Lee—to the outermost limits...
...But not for long: a second biography, by William Harbaugh in 1961, corrected Pringle's biases and inferences, and Edmund Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) drew a sympathetic, and immensely popular, personal portrait...
...He became so infuriated with Taft, who sought only to please his mentor, that he gleefully divided the Republican Party and elected his nemesis, Woodrow Wilson...
...In the annals of the presidency, TR is easily its most vivid and distinctive incumbent—even if his two terms were relaThe American Spectator • March 1998 77 tively placid...
...The bitterness he provoked in his 1912 challenge to the Republican incumbent William Howard Taft had largely dissipated...
...Wherever he looked—as statesman, conservationist, party politician, trust-buster, naturalist, social critic, or scholar—Roosevelt was swift to draw lines in the sand and apply moral lessons to suit his particular needs...
...As scientist and scholar, he was shictly a gifted amateur...
...Dead at 6o, the president who had been so precocious in his day was on the threshold of anachronism...
...The Gilded Age had transformed the United States from a largely agrarian state to an industrial society, and the impetus for "reform" — in the management of cities, the power of commerce, the changing relations between capital and labor—yielded a president with powerful designs...
...A life in science, which he had contemplated at Harvard, failed to arouse the competitive instincts which, if left unsatisfied, might easily have devoured him...
...Something of a dandy-aristocrat at heart, he fashioned himself a tribune of the people, reveling in exploits of gunfire and sweat...
...But there is a central mystery that can never be explained...
...Things went steadily downhill after that...
...the sense of his distinctive temperament is conveyed...
...The great challenge, for any Roosevelt biographer, is to calculate the source of TR's energy and zeal...
...He was publicly indifferent to critics and opponents, but privately raged and indulged in trivial feuds...
...He believed that privilege demanded public service, but he didn't regard himself as a civic supplicant: he wanted power, too, and craved success...
...As with any historic figure, it is difficult to translate Roosevelt's actions and convictions into modem times...
...The presidency he invented was suited to a certain epoch in our history, now long past...
...To some degree, this was a matter of historic inevitability...
...Brands Basic Books / 897 pages /$35 REVIEWED BY Philip Terzian T he president who built a bridge to the twentieth century was a Republican aristocrat from New York named Theodore Roosevelt...
...TR's voice is frequently deployed to emphasize points or illustrate problems: the reader is guided, not pushed, to conclusions...
...Roosevelt did not say one thing while meaning another...
...1 any politician, he was easily convinced that people who disagreed with him were not only misguided, but lethal...
...That opened the floodgates...
...It would be difficult to think of anyone with fewer personal and political similarities to the president who is building a bridge to the twenty-first century...
...oosevelt struck his contemporaries R as a force of nature, and it is easy to see why: the passion, and occasional violence, of his character is a wonder to behold...
...Roosevelt is usually credited with the creation of the modern presidency—which is to say, he broke the pattern of post-Civil War control by Congress and pushed the claims of the executive branch...
...So is his capacity for intense absorption and self-delusion...
...And he entered politics not because he sought to elevate society, but because (as he said) he intended to be a member of the governing class...
...And yet, had he lived, it is not so easy to say how things might have evolved...
...the contemporary liberal shares his attitude toward capitalists...
...It is interesting to note that, until he entered the White House, Roosevelt considered himself something of a failure in life...
...This served him well when adjusting government to the demands of a modern industrial economy, defying powerful interests or defining America's position in the world...
...The second question is more complicated...
...Professor Brands provides us with the ingredients, and skillfully examines the evidence and stories...
...The story is well known: The asthmatic little boy who willed himself to robust manhood...
...My mother, now in her eighty-sixth year, remembers her own mother weeping at the news of Roosevelt's death in 1919...
...The author's sources'for these conclusions are almost entirely primary: Roosevelt was an inveterate diarist and correspondent, and while his writings were often meant to be read for effect, they are also immensely, sometimes unintentionally, revealing...
...Undoubtedly this tells us more about Clinton than about Roosevelt...
...nor did he abandon principles for expedience...
...Roosevelt was a character...
...He could not have known how posterity would look, and we cannot imagine how he might have adapted himself to changing times...
...At the time of his demise, TR's standing with the public was probably higher than at any time since his presidency ended ten years before...
...he had a large, handsome family, he provoked and excited, and he happily intruded in places where presidents never before thought to go...
...Then things turned around...
...the author lets the subject speak for himself, seldom interrupting to render final judgment...
...power...
...Moreover, there is probably a Roosevelt for everyone: at once a soldier, conservationist, enemy of Wall Street, truculent statesman, cowboy, historian, asthmatic, New York Brahmin, naval enthusiast, political progressive, Victorian, great white hunter, grieving widower, and devoted father...
...In the early 1950's Elting Morison published an eight-volume edition of Roosevelt's correspondence...
...That influence, however, has verifiablelimits...
...his faith was in action, not reflection...
...This is equally true of Theodore Roosevelt...
...Like many inheritors of old money, he harbored a contempt for the rising business class, preferring to idealize the sturdy rustic yeoman...
...The modern Republican Party is no more the party of Lincoln than the Democratic Party is the party of Jefferson, and the circumstances in which these politicians thrived are unimaginably different from our own...
...And why would a Democratic president cherish an icon of this partisan Republican...
...The answer to the first question is simple...
...He PHILIP TERZIAN writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal...
...Only as a citizen-soldier, in his charge up San Juan Hill, did he consider himself an unqualified success...
...In the pantheon of leadership, the second Roosevelt had effectively supplanted the first...
...The title of Professor Brands's work is self-explanatory...
Vol. 31 • March 1998 • No. 3
